To me the interesting part about Don't Look Up was the characterization of leadership. Whether is was the President, the head of tech company, heads of a talk show, or the more empathetic head of the newspaper willing to run an article about the comet, when they switched into business mode they seemed extremely inhuman. It induced anxiety in me about how many decisions are made in this cold and calculating way. Not that it's bad, it just might be bad as making decisions around things like "how to talk about an apocalypse risk comet"
I’m not as alarmist from a global perspective as you are. I’m sure if you live and have your livelihood in Taiwan, being absorbed into the PRC is unpleasant. The question for the US and Americans is: is this a nuclear war issue. My view is it isn’t and the more we pretend it is the more we encourage nuclear proliferation.
I do remember that, in the State of the Union response that killed his political career, Bobby Jindal tried to make a scoff line out of "the government is spending money on something called 'volcano monitoring'!" and ran into the problem that, while I'm sure people are less focused on the nature of the threat than they should be, volcanoes do seem like the kinds of things we should be spending *some* money to monitor.
"I am in favor of all forms of zero-carbon energy — wind and solar and hydro and nuclear and geothermal too"
Me too, except hydro. Here in the northwestern corner of the country, we have lots of hydro. And electricity is cheap. But it has had serious negative consequences for ecosystems/wildlife habitat/biodiversity. I'd rather have more nuclear, solar, and geothermal (we have poor-to-middling wind resources here). Leave dam building to the beavers (no, I don't mean the Oregon State Beavers).
Doing anything significant about climate change is going to be impossible so long as "environmentalists" don't join the effort to promote a tax on net CO2 emissions. That does not mean primarying any politician who does not vote for one next week, or that there are not public investment to be made if their effects on net C2 emissions are evaluated at the the tax rate, but it's important to have clear objectives.
On nuclear power: putting side Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island and Fukushima (the catastrophic potential of point source failures), how do we secure the safety of the waste products, which will be dangerous for something like 10,000 years, longer than recorded human history? Safe from natural events and from terrorist uses. Covering the landscape and populating the oceans with windmills and solar energy collectors seems much safer.
Why is 10k years an issue? In 10k years, if civilization has collapsed, they won't have the mining technology to get at the material. If they have the mining technology then the 12022 version of OSHA will mandate radiation detectors in mining like they do now and they will know what they are dealing with.
And even if they had the mining technology but not the radiation detection technology or regulatory requirement they'd find the steel, glass and concrete vessels and cracked one open they'd die within a few days. They might send someone else down and they would die. Then they'd say, "You know what whatever it is its' super dangerous. We should just fill the hole in again."
That compared to the death and destruction of climate change that seems like a tiny consideration.
You know how you can tell an environmental activist or climate activist or even a climate scientist is fundamentally ignorant of science? They say stupid shit like solving this problem is just a matter of political will.
This piece is just chock full of things one might question. Like how do you know lab security isn't being enhanced? And how precisely do you do anything about the zoonotic crossover of diseases? I have seen some loony stuff about that, mostly at Vox, but not exclusively. I am glad that you have discovered evolution exists. And it will never stop. And yes much more lethal strains may yet evolve. I will be surprised if that doesn't happen. And yet you seem rather irrationally opposed to something generically referred to as gain of function research. Well, as it happens, evolution has a whole planet on which to conduct gain of function research. And the odds of us beating evolution to a particularly nasty gain of function and it escaping from a lab is really quite remote. Anticipating what evolution might come up with, on the other hand, may save millions of lives. And no one will even know it happened.
I think I've made this point before, probably to you, but gain of function research was apparently being done before and did nothing to help with the current pandemic. So what will be different?
Also, I'm not even sure how in principle it could help. Our approaches (designing vaccines and small-molecule therapeutics) can (1) be worked on to target existing viruses and (2) will probably need to be tweaked for emergent threats regardless. Gain-of-function research, for example, will not give you any additional insight into the main protease (target of paxlovid), which is highly conserved between coronaviruses anyway.
All you have to do here is explain to me how you go about studying the zoonotic and interspecies transmission of diseases, which from the virus point of view is gain of function, without studying gain of function. It's how evolution does it. You can either try to anticipate evolution or you can just let it surprise you. Alas the term is sufficiently vague as to be meaningless.
I feel like the proponents of doing a “Manhattan Project for Problem X” loses track of how the actual Manhattan Project worked.
The Manhattan project was a big secret project; there was no public political case for it. We had a wartime economy where the government had depressed consumption so it could put massive resources into military projects. The war motivated top scientists to put their academic careers on hold to work on this secret project. It was designed to pursue a specific technology (atomic weaponry) rather than an outcome (win the war). It was also competitive: if the US was not the first one to build it we would be at a disadvantage. This created a unique circumstance - the government was able to build a breakthrough technology that grossly advanced our national interest. Yet we keep describing any challenge to be solved with technology as a “Manhattan Project”.
What does a “Manhattan Project for Climate” mean? That we should just spend more on relevant research? That we want the researchers to work for the government? That the US needs to be the one developing the innovation? That we should increase the social prestige of working on these projects? That we should do the work in secret to overcome any political resistance? Or just that we want as emphatic a victory as the defeat of the Axis?
Forming some research institutes sounds much more like the “War on Cancer” approach then the “Manhattan Project” approach.
That makes sense. ‘Moonshot’ is interesting because it has becomes a catch-all for a long-running project with high risks and returns. Whereas an ‘Apollo program for X’ would seem like a more literal comparison to how that project was structured. And I would guess that Apollo is also not a great reference point for innovation at a global scale.
I'm just thinking that you're taking the term "Manhattan Project" too literally in this context. Matt is clearly just using it to mean a huge commitment of public resources to a speculative scientific endeavor with large expected benefits if it works.
These are very good questions. I would like to point out though that the Manhattan Project produced immense amounts of serendipitous discoveries. My textbooks on solid state physics were full of references to scientists and discoveries that originated with the scientists who worked on that project.
That’s true. The US hired all the scientists who were doing academic work in atomic physics and had them work in secret labs. So it is no wonder that they made many discoveries there. But did the discoveries come better or faster than they would if the scientists had been spread across many academic institutions? If the scientists followed their own path they would have discovered the transistor earlier. I’m not sure I see a connection between the way we organized the manhattan project and the utility of its results.
The best critique I saw of the film was a response to one of Sirota's publicity drip campaign tweets congratulating themselves for proving that you could make Climate Change movies "popular" ("it's number #1 on the worlds largest streaming platform!") , which (to paraphrase it), just said:
"Remember in the film when they make a movie about the asteroid and smugly assure themselves they have really accomplished something and we, the audience, know that absolutely nothing has changed at all?"
My main thought in hindsight is that, absent the coordinated drip campaign, literally no one was going to assume the movie was about climate change. The handful of friends who i interacted with in regards to the movie all seemed to assume it was about COVID-19 (Climate Change seemed to be far from their mind) or perhaps just a silly movie about a comet, etc.
At the end of the day, I think it illustrates just how awful this brand of Left Wing activism is at messaging and solidifying support for an goal they support...the movie was basically crafted to only appeal or reveal itself to a narrow subset of "insiders" who spent the whole time talking about how "genius" it was that there was an Elon Musk / Joe Biden type character who sold cell phones...
Matt, since you're known to be a popular writer among White House staff, why don't you do a multi-day tweet storm on how we need to beef up our pandemic preparedness? Like your Hungary dunks, but useful.
As you say, funding research into super vaccines would be easy to implement and have a great RoR.
Oh and speaking of not getting credit for things that don't happen.
The US spends a couple $100 million a year tracking any object that could threaten the Earth. I think we've got upwards of 95% of them identified. NASA even launched a mission to test deflection technology in November:
In the most likely case the object will be identified several years out, they will launch a mission to deflect it, and the object will pass harmlessly past Earth. And most people won't know or care. Why? Because we fixed it.
The other issues is that when we have some giant problem and fix it no one notices. Remember Y2K? Big problem, we spend a few $100 billion and fixed it. Remember Acid Rain? Fixed. Remember the Hole in the Ozone Layer? Fixed.
The great flaw in human cognition is that people never get the credit they deserve for things that don't happen. Like this poor guy:
But seriously, good point and interesting anecdote. In a similar vein, its hard to say a guy who got a Nobel Prize, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, AND a recent mention on Jeopardy has been overlooked, but Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, is less well-known than he ought to be.
To me the interesting part about Don't Look Up was the characterization of leadership. Whether is was the President, the head of tech company, heads of a talk show, or the more empathetic head of the newspaper willing to run an article about the comet, when they switched into business mode they seemed extremely inhuman. It induced anxiety in me about how many decisions are made in this cold and calculating way. Not that it's bad, it just might be bad as making decisions around things like "how to talk about an apocalypse risk comet"
"The trouble, as always, is a cohort of older, less-educated, less-urbanized voters who have more conservative views across the board."
BOY, isn't THAT a sentence that fits into nearly every policy discussion!
I’m not as alarmist from a global perspective as you are. I’m sure if you live and have your livelihood in Taiwan, being absorbed into the PRC is unpleasant. The question for the US and Americans is: is this a nuclear war issue. My view is it isn’t and the more we pretend it is the more we encourage nuclear proliferation.
I do remember that, in the State of the Union response that killed his political career, Bobby Jindal tried to make a scoff line out of "the government is spending money on something called 'volcano monitoring'!" and ran into the problem that, while I'm sure people are less focused on the nature of the threat than they should be, volcanoes do seem like the kinds of things we should be spending *some* money to monitor.
"I am in favor of all forms of zero-carbon energy — wind and solar and hydro and nuclear and geothermal too"
Me too, except hydro. Here in the northwestern corner of the country, we have lots of hydro. And electricity is cheap. But it has had serious negative consequences for ecosystems/wildlife habitat/biodiversity. I'd rather have more nuclear, solar, and geothermal (we have poor-to-middling wind resources here). Leave dam building to the beavers (no, I don't mean the Oregon State Beavers).
Dude, this movie was just bad. Pick any metaphor you want, it still sucks.
Doing anything significant about climate change is going to be impossible so long as "environmentalists" don't join the effort to promote a tax on net CO2 emissions. That does not mean primarying any politician who does not vote for one next week, or that there are not public investment to be made if their effects on net C2 emissions are evaluated at the the tax rate, but it's important to have clear objectives.
Why not pass the biodefense plan on its own? Surely some Rs would support it. Anyone voting against it would be on record if there's another pandemic.
On nuclear power: putting side Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island and Fukushima (the catastrophic potential of point source failures), how do we secure the safety of the waste products, which will be dangerous for something like 10,000 years, longer than recorded human history? Safe from natural events and from terrorist uses. Covering the landscape and populating the oceans with windmills and solar energy collectors seems much safer.
Next-gen reactors greatly reduce this problem.
Why is 10k years an issue? In 10k years, if civilization has collapsed, they won't have the mining technology to get at the material. If they have the mining technology then the 12022 version of OSHA will mandate radiation detectors in mining like they do now and they will know what they are dealing with.
And even if they had the mining technology but not the radiation detection technology or regulatory requirement they'd find the steel, glass and concrete vessels and cracked one open they'd die within a few days. They might send someone else down and they would die. Then they'd say, "You know what whatever it is its' super dangerous. We should just fill the hole in again."
That compared to the death and destruction of climate change that seems like a tiny consideration.
You know how you can tell an environmental activist or climate activist or even a climate scientist is fundamentally ignorant of science? They say stupid shit like solving this problem is just a matter of political will.
This piece is just chock full of things one might question. Like how do you know lab security isn't being enhanced? And how precisely do you do anything about the zoonotic crossover of diseases? I have seen some loony stuff about that, mostly at Vox, but not exclusively. I am glad that you have discovered evolution exists. And it will never stop. And yes much more lethal strains may yet evolve. I will be surprised if that doesn't happen. And yet you seem rather irrationally opposed to something generically referred to as gain of function research. Well, as it happens, evolution has a whole planet on which to conduct gain of function research. And the odds of us beating evolution to a particularly nasty gain of function and it escaping from a lab is really quite remote. Anticipating what evolution might come up with, on the other hand, may save millions of lives. And no one will even know it happened.
I think I've made this point before, probably to you, but gain of function research was apparently being done before and did nothing to help with the current pandemic. So what will be different?
Also, I'm not even sure how in principle it could help. Our approaches (designing vaccines and small-molecule therapeutics) can (1) be worked on to target existing viruses and (2) will probably need to be tweaked for emergent threats regardless. Gain-of-function research, for example, will not give you any additional insight into the main protease (target of paxlovid), which is highly conserved between coronaviruses anyway.
All you have to do here is explain to me how you go about studying the zoonotic and interspecies transmission of diseases, which from the virus point of view is gain of function, without studying gain of function. It's how evolution does it. You can either try to anticipate evolution or you can just let it surprise you. Alas the term is sufficiently vague as to be meaningless.
You can study existing viruses without trying to create new ones in the lab.
I feel like the proponents of doing a “Manhattan Project for Problem X” loses track of how the actual Manhattan Project worked.
The Manhattan project was a big secret project; there was no public political case for it. We had a wartime economy where the government had depressed consumption so it could put massive resources into military projects. The war motivated top scientists to put their academic careers on hold to work on this secret project. It was designed to pursue a specific technology (atomic weaponry) rather than an outcome (win the war). It was also competitive: if the US was not the first one to build it we would be at a disadvantage. This created a unique circumstance - the government was able to build a breakthrough technology that grossly advanced our national interest. Yet we keep describing any challenge to be solved with technology as a “Manhattan Project”.
What does a “Manhattan Project for Climate” mean? That we should just spend more on relevant research? That we want the researchers to work for the government? That the US needs to be the one developing the innovation? That we should increase the social prestige of working on these projects? That we should do the work in secret to overcome any political resistance? Or just that we want as emphatic a victory as the defeat of the Axis?
Forming some research institutes sounds much more like the “War on Cancer” approach then the “Manhattan Project” approach.
Substitute the word "moonshot" if "Manhattan Project" doesn't work for you.
That makes sense. ‘Moonshot’ is interesting because it has becomes a catch-all for a long-running project with high risks and returns. Whereas an ‘Apollo program for X’ would seem like a more literal comparison to how that project was structured. And I would guess that Apollo is also not a great reference point for innovation at a global scale.
I'm just thinking that you're taking the term "Manhattan Project" too literally in this context. Matt is clearly just using it to mean a huge commitment of public resources to a speculative scientific endeavor with large expected benefits if it works.
These are very good questions. I would like to point out though that the Manhattan Project produced immense amounts of serendipitous discoveries. My textbooks on solid state physics were full of references to scientists and discoveries that originated with the scientists who worked on that project.
That’s true. The US hired all the scientists who were doing academic work in atomic physics and had them work in secret labs. So it is no wonder that they made many discoveries there. But did the discoveries come better or faster than they would if the scientists had been spread across many academic institutions? If the scientists followed their own path they would have discovered the transistor earlier. I’m not sure I see a connection between the way we organized the manhattan project and the utility of its results.
The best critique I saw of the film was a response to one of Sirota's publicity drip campaign tweets congratulating themselves for proving that you could make Climate Change movies "popular" ("it's number #1 on the worlds largest streaming platform!") , which (to paraphrase it), just said:
"Remember in the film when they make a movie about the asteroid and smugly assure themselves they have really accomplished something and we, the audience, know that absolutely nothing has changed at all?"
My main thought in hindsight is that, absent the coordinated drip campaign, literally no one was going to assume the movie was about climate change. The handful of friends who i interacted with in regards to the movie all seemed to assume it was about COVID-19 (Climate Change seemed to be far from their mind) or perhaps just a silly movie about a comet, etc.
At the end of the day, I think it illustrates just how awful this brand of Left Wing activism is at messaging and solidifying support for an goal they support...the movie was basically crafted to only appeal or reveal itself to a narrow subset of "insiders" who spent the whole time talking about how "genius" it was that there was an Elon Musk / Joe Biden type character who sold cell phones...
Matt, since you're known to be a popular writer among White House staff, why don't you do a multi-day tweet storm on how we need to beef up our pandemic preparedness? Like your Hungary dunks, but useful.
As you say, funding research into super vaccines would be easy to implement and have a great RoR.
Oh and speaking of not getting credit for things that don't happen.
The US spends a couple $100 million a year tracking any object that could threaten the Earth. I think we've got upwards of 95% of them identified. NASA even launched a mission to test deflection technology in November:
https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart
In the most likely case the object will be identified several years out, they will launch a mission to deflect it, and the object will pass harmlessly past Earth. And most people won't know or care. Why? Because we fixed it.
The other issues is that when we have some giant problem and fix it no one notices. Remember Y2K? Big problem, we spend a few $100 billion and fixed it. Remember Acid Rain? Fixed. Remember the Hole in the Ozone Layer? Fixed.
The great flaw in human cognition is that people never get the credit they deserve for things that don't happen. Like this poor guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
He literally saved the world.
"He literally saved the world."
You call this saved?!?
But seriously, good point and interesting anecdote. In a similar vein, its hard to say a guy who got a Nobel Prize, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, AND a recent mention on Jeopardy has been overlooked, but Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, is less well-known than he ought to be.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Norman-Borlaug
I highly recommend Charles Mann's book The Wizard and the Prophet for anyone interested in Borlaug and/or the issues raised in this post.